Our near-socialist Ministers are developing near-incredible
energy. Peshekhonov has declared that “the resistance of
the capitalists has apparently been broken” and that
everything we have here in Holy Russia will be
“equitably” distributed. Skobelev has declared that
the capitalists will have to give up 100 per cent of their
profits. Tsereteli has declared that the offensive in this
imperialist war is the most righteous thing from the point of
view of both democracy and socialism.

But Minister Chernov has without a doubt outdone everyone in
these manifestations of miraculous energy. At the last meeting
of the Provisional Government, Chernov made the Cadet gentlemen
hear his report on the general policy of the department
entrusted to him, and said he was introducing as many as
ten Bills!

Surely that was a miracle of revolutionary energy. Less than six
weeks have passed since May 6, and yet as many as ten Bills have
been promised in this short period! And what Bills! The
ministerial Dyelo Naroda reports that these Bills
“in their totality encompass all the principal aspects of
the economic activity of the countryside”.

The only suspicious thing is that the ministerial news paper
devotes more than one hundred lines to a description of
some of those splendid Bills without saying anything
definite about any of them. “Suspension of
certain legislative acts concerning the peasants”—we are
not told which. The Bill on the “courts of
conciliation” is the most interesting. We are not told
who are to be conciliated and how.
“The regulation of rent
relations”—we are kept completely
in the dark; we are not even told whether it is a question
of leasing the landed estates, which are expected to be
expropriated without compensation.

“A reform in the sense of greater democratisation of the
local land committees.” Wouldn’t it be better if you authors of
sweeping promises immediately listed at least a dozen local land
committees, giving, in exact terms, their present,
post-revolutionary, yet, according to your own admission, not
fully democratic composition?

The point is that the tireless activity of Minister Chernov, as
well as of the other Ministers mentioned above, is the best
illustration of the difference between a liberal bureaucrat and
a revolutionary democrat.

The liberal bureaucrat submits to his “higher-ups”,
i.e., Lvov, Shingaryov and Co., voluminous reports on hundreds
of Bills that are supposed to benefit mankind. All he offers the
people is palaver, fine promises,
Nozdrev[1]
phrases (such as the one about 100 per cent profit or a
“socialist” offensive at the front, and so on).

The revolutionary democrat, while submitting a report to his
“higher-ups”, or even before submitting it, reveals
and exposes every evil and every shortcoming before the people
to arouse their, activity.

“Peasants, expose the landowners, expose how much they
take from you by way of ’rent’, how much they have had ad judged
to them in the ’courts of conciliation’ or the local land
committees, how much cavilling or interference they have been
guilty of as regards cultivating all the lands and using the
landowners’ implements and livestock to meet the needs of the
people, particularly the poorest sections! Expose it yourselves,
peasants, and I, a minister of revolutionary Russia’, ’a
minister of the revolutionary democrats’, shall help
you to publish all such exposures and to remove all oppression
through your pressure from the bottom and mine from the top!!!”
Surely, this is how a true “revolutionary democrat”
would speak and act.

Nothing of the kind here! Nothing at all! Here is the language
used by the ministerial newspaper in regard to Chernov’s
“report” to Lvov and Co. “While he does not
deny that there are a number of agrarian excesses in some
gubernias, V. M. Chernov thinks that, on the whole, rural
Russia has proved to be much more balanced than one would have
expected....”

Yet not a word was said about the hold-up of the only
Bill named specifically—the one about “suspending
the sale and purchase of land”. For the peasants had long
since been promised the immediate suspension of sale and
purchase. It was promised as early as May, but on June 25 we
read in the papers that Chernov had presented a
“report” and that the Provisional Government
“has not yet taken a final decision”!!!